http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/3956129.stm
“A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state’s African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals.”
(Click link for full story.)
Note that this report isn’t from some sleazy tabloid. This is the freaking BBC reporting it. Bush seems to have sunk to a new moral low.
Looks to me like it’s the BBC that’s sunk to a new low. All they have is a list of names and addresses. All the rest is unsupported ranting from Florida democratic officials.
Looks like the BBC has been going to the CBS school of journalism. There may be the makings of a story here, but the BBC hasn’t made it. They went public with wild, partisan speculation.
The really disturbing thing is that the people doing this do have some law on their side. An obscure Florida statute allows for poll observers to challenge the credentials of would-be voters; if the proper procedure is followed, the voter may cast only a provisional ballot. http://election.tbo.com/election/MGBMNVKZS0E.html
Agreed. There seems like their might be a story here, but they don’t have enough meat on the bones to make a meal of it (sorry for the food reference, I’m eating lunch).
I can understand wanting to get this story out before the elections in the event of something happening, but right now this is a whole lot of nothing.
No, it certainly smells. Hardly a smoking gun, but this-
"Republican spokespersons claim the list merely records returned mail from either fundraising solicitations or returned letters sent to newly registered voters to verify their addresses for purposes of mailing campaign literature."
. . . sounds about as genuine as an Ashlee Simpson concert. Yeah, six days to go until election and the Florida Pubs are concerned about tidying up their mailing lists. :rolleyes:
Given that I just spent yesterday tracking down all the people the Republicans challenged in my area (surprise surprise what ethnic group and age range most of them were!), and personally found tons of perfectly legitimate voters living in the county who would have otherwise have been stripped from the rolls if no one bothered to tell them before the contesting deadline, I’m not going to have a lot of sympathy for claims that Republicans are just trying to prevent voter fraud (wink wink!) and nasty Democrats are just making crazy wild accusations.
This game gets played every year (though never this big before), and after the election the Republicans quietly pay their fines, let a few floozies go into the clink, and smile because there are no do-overs in elections.
I’m as inclined to give the benefit of the doubt as anyone. Try as I might, I really have a hard time coming up with a legitimate reason why the Republicans would have lists of voters in black Democratic areas except to challenge their ballots on Tuesday.
That was the thing that really struck me here too. Yes, this article points at the potential for sleaze, but hasn’t actually demonstrated it, but what I really don’t get is how on earth it can be acceptable to have a law allowing political party workers to challenge voters and prevent them from obtaining a ballot unless they sign an affidavit. Shouldn’t any challenge (in order to prevent voter fraud) be entirely up to a non-partisan election official working at the polling station? How can they allow parties to do this? Seems ridiculous, but I really don’t get the American voting process.
I hope I’m wrong . . . but the way things are shaping up, I think this might be the first time in a long time we see some actual physical violence at the polls.
The report can be viewed from the link in the OP. T’was interesting but nothing more.
Also Newsnight isn’t just a straight news program. It’s a analysis program and such has special reports every now and then that look at one item. Don’t know about the link as I didn’t read it but on the actual program last night they had a major player (Lawyer but aren’t they all) from the Bush team in the last election campaign addressing points in the report. The BBC almost always balances it’s reports.
PJ O’Rourke was on the show at the end basically saying that the UK has spin and corruption and the US has rigged elections.
It’s a law with a legitimate purpose that was never really expected to be used en masse. It has the potential to turn voting from a process where the legitimate voters get on the rolls (and any legal fights happen before or after that process) to something where you walk in the door and are immediately brought up to defend yourself in an impromptu court complete with a prosecutor (the 100$ a day Republican hired gun) the defense (a Democrat volunteer), jury (poll workers), and a judge (presiding judge, who in many swing states will be a Republican, because the results of the last governor’s race determine it). As if voting wasn’t already hard and scary enough for some people.
The whole plot more than stinks. Long lines, frustation at how hard voting is and how long it takes are ALREADY major factors in supressing Democratic turnout. It’s always the case in every major election. And this will inevitably worsen that problem, and everybody knows it full well. In fact, when the BOE’s in a few smaller counties around here ruled that they’d quickly toss out any challengers who were disruptive, the Republicans basically backed off filing challengers in those areas, focusing their manpower elsewhere.
Okay, it’s the Onion, but I like making fun of my birth state…
This may be the law in many states. Some years back I worked as an election inspector in Michigan in a number of elections. I read the complete rules, and MI law allows for poll observers to challenge the credentials of would-be voters. And as an election inspector, even I had the right to challenge the qualification of a voter. I could have said “I don’t believe this person is a qualified voter”, and in that case the ballot would have been a provisional one, and after the election a decision would have had to be made on the validity of the vote. I never did this, and I never heard of a case where either an observer or election inspector ever challenged a vote. However, theoretically either an observer or election inspector could have done so.
Only oddball situation I had to deal with is that in one election a blind voter showed up and wanted to cast a ballot. I was the only inspector there who actually knew the procedure for this case. I was an election inspector with a stated party preference as a Democrat. I had to get another election inspector who was a Republican. This was easy. (The reason I managed to get the job as an election inspector is the law states that at every precinct, every effort should be made that there is at least one Democrat and Republican inspector on the job. I live in a Republican dominated township. Thus, I was the token Democrat inspector to comply with the law.) The law here requires that in such a case, the inspectors must go through the whole ballot reading off everything, and asking the blind person how they wanted to vote. One inspector punches the ballot thusly, while the inspector from the other party observes that the proper punch was made. It took over an hour for just this one voter. I read off the ballot to the blind person, and the Republican inspector punched out the appropriate vote. I was shocked this blind woman voter just didn’t cast an absentee ballot. However, the law in MI stated that in such a case, the election inspectors MUST assist and allow a blind voter to cast a ballot per the procedure I noted above. None of the other inspectors had a clue what to do in such a situation. Had I not known the law already, that blind woman could have waited a long time until the township clerk got back to them on the proper procedure.
(BTW, the law in this state says that any voter who requests assistance in voting must be dealt with per the same rules. The same MUST be done for illiterate voters, physically handicapped voters who can vote themselves with the butterfly ballots, etc.)
That’s the real strategy, I think. Use these challenges to gum up the works. Cause long, slow-moving lines in Democratic precincts in the hopes that voters may get tired of waiting and go home.
It stinks.
Thank goddess when I was an election inspector it was in Michigan this wasn’t an issue. While theoretically MI law allows the same sort of challenges as Florida, none of the election inspectors even had considered the possibility ballots would have been challenged. As the token Democrat inspector in my precinct, as I had to take an oath to follow MI election law, if the Republicans had been challenging voters I’d have spent 13 hours when the polls were open saying “per Michigan law, I insist that this person be allowed to cast a provisional ballot.” The law here allows election inspectors to do this. At the end of the day, there would have been a stack of provisional ballots to be dealt with. At the time I just thought I was hired as an election inspector was just due to some silly, technical legal formality. Gotta have a Dem inspector per the law, and all that. I never considered that being an election inspector was significant in a democracy. NOW I know that it is.
Oh dear. You are right. Scary. Good thing I cast an absentee ballot. And, theoretically illegally. I had to state I would be out of town. Almost certainly I will be in town, but work obligations on election day may mean I could not be able to vote. Thus the absentee ballot.
Brain, you’re a phrophet: Man accused of trying to run down Rep. Katherine Harris
A harbinger of things to come?
I was thinking more along the lines of fistfights between Pub pollwatchers and Dem pollwatchers – or between Pub vote-challengers and challenged voters.
Interesting possibility. Can Florida election inspectors request a police officer to be stationed at the precinct? I can’t remember MI law mentioning this possibility, although when I was an election inspector if I did I can’t imagine the local police refusing. Imagine the headline “Police refuse to maintain order at the polls”. Given this is a realistic possibility this year in Florida, I can imagine that poll inspectors may indeed demand police presence.
Yet some might regard a police presence at the polls as “intimidation” in and of itself – considering the rumors of police roadblocks keeping Florida blacks from the polls in 2000, and the tactic some Pubs have used of distributing flyers in black neighborhoods falsely claiming that if you have any outstanding warrants or traffic fines when you go to vote, you will be arrested.